The legal and criminal justice systems proceed on the masculinist assumption that a woman's body communicates her lack of consent to sexual intercourse and that a woman will offer strong physical resistance to sexual violence. Recent changes to the legal definition of non-consent as a positive and performative act provide women with greater protection under the rape laws. Women are unlikely to be protected by the law, however, if their physical resistance to sexual assault results in death or serious injury. This paper argues that, to ensure that women subjected to sexual violence have full equality and justice before the law, all manifestations of women's resistances must be seen as acceptable and lawful acts of self-defence.
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